"Two endings for a guy like me," Tony Soprano told his therapist back in Season Four. "Dead, or in the can."

As we prepare to say addio to America's favorite mobster -- and await his fate -- here's a look at the just-deserved ends of some other famous fictional gangsters.

* Tom Powers (played by James Cagney in 1931's "The Public Enemy"): After single-handedly shooting it out with rival bootleggers, gang boss Tom survives, only to be kidnapped from the hospital and murdered. He meets one of the grimmest ends of any movie mobster. His trussed-up corpse is propped outside his mother's front door, to topple face down when the door is opened, while "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" plays on a scratchy Victrola.

* Rico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson in 1931's "Little Caesar"): "Mother of Mercy. Is this the end of Rico?" And how. After his gangland empire crumbles and he's reduced to living in flophouses, Rico is cut down by a lawman's machine-gun burst -- fired through a wooden billboard with apparent disregard for anyone besides Rico who might be back there. At least he got one of the great exit lines in movie history.

* Tony Camonte (played by Paul Muni in 1932's "Scarface"): After seizing control of an unnamed city (read: Chicago), tommygun in hand ("Some little typewriter, eh? I'm gonna write my name all over this town with big letters!"), Tony precipitates his own fall by jealously shooting his right-hand man (George Raft) for having an affair with his sister, not realizing they've been secretly married. When the cops arrive, he shoots it out with them from the windows of his fortress-like apartment. When he tries to escape, he's gunned down in the street. After pressure from the censors (they felt Tony got off too easy), director Howard Hawks shot an alternate ending, in which Tony is captured, tried and hanged. Though the ending was never used, it's available on the DVD release.

* Rocky Sullivan (Cagney in 1938's "Angels With Dirty Faces"): Did he or didn't he? When he's sent to Death Row for murder, mob boss Rocky is asked by his lifelong friend, Father Connelly (Pat O'Brien), to break down as he walks his last mile, to subvert the admiration of the group of street toughs (played by the Dead End Kids) who've come to idolize and imitate him. Rocky refuses, but when that long walk ends, he struggles and screams as if he's lost his nerve. "ROCKY DIES YELLOW: KILLER COWARD AT END!" the newspapers declare. But was it fear, or an eleventh-hour attempt at redemption? You decide.

* Eddie Bartlett (Cagney in 1939's "The Roaring Twenties"): Former racket boss Eddie is drawn back in when an old partner (Humphrey Bogart) threatens a woman (Priscilla Lane) Eddie once loved, leading to one of the greatest death scenes in movie history. Shot by Bogie's bodyguards after he's killed their boss, Eddie stumbles up the snow-covered steps of a nearby church before collapsing. Speakeasy owner Panama Smith (Gladys George) cradles him in his last moments, a Warner Bros. pieta. When a policeman asks who the dead man was, teary-eyed Panama gives Eddie the classic fallen gangster eulogy -- "He used to be a big shot."

* Michael Corleone (Al Pacino in 1990's "The Godfather Part III): After his brutal rise to power in the first two "Godfather" films, Michael finishes Part III an old and broken man. Isolated and alone, his beloved daughter accidentally slain by assassins, Michael passes away at some undetermined future date, sitting in the courtyard of a rural Italian villa, lost in memory, the symbolic orange of death tumbling from his hand as he takes his last breath and crumples to the ground.

* Henry Hill (Ray Liotta in 1990's "Goodfellas"): The only real-life gangster of the bunch, Hill eventually turned on his fellow mobsters and went into the Witness Protection Program, ending up with a new identity in a small Midwestern town. "Today everything is different," he says at the end of the film, directly addressing the camera. "There's no action. . . . I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook." In reality, Hill's problems with the law -- and drug addiction -- continued for years. He was arrested and jailed twice for drug offenses, and ended up a frequent guest on The Howard Stern Show. He's now developing -- what else? -- a reality television show.